The construction of 3D model of scene object based on image is an important component of generating virtual reality and virtual scene. Particularly, the construction of 3D model of scene object of non-rigid deformation such as clothing is the research focus of international frontier at present. 3D clothing model with strong sense of reality is of a value to be widely applied.
The conventional methods to construct clothing 3D clothing model refer to the processes of actual processes of designing and cutting a clothing and establish the steps including 2D pattern design, physical simulation, etc and utilize the human-involved parameter iterative optimization to create a final 3D clothing model. The conventional methods of constructing 3D model clothing depend too much on manual operation and consume a large amount of time in physical simulation. Meanwhile, a higher level of knowledge in clothing field is needed for a person to perform modeling, so these methods are difficult to get popular in non-professionals.
The method of constructing 3D clothing model based on sketch allows the user to design the silhouette and detail information of clothing directly on a model of human body. So the 3D clothing is modeled as a surface offset to the model of human body. In particular, the researchers of the University of British Columbia recently propose a method of analyzing the sketch of clothing with sensitive content which calculates the tension degree between a clothing and human body to successfully improve modeling quality in the loose areas of clothing. However, most of the existing methods of constructing 3D clothing model based on sketch have many limitations in human poses and user interaction. Specifically, on one hand, the existing methods require a standing pose of the model of human body and the skeleton movements are limited in 2D image plane; on the other hand, the existing methods require the user to design manually silhouette and details of clothing (such as folds and wrinkles, etc) and hence a higher level of professional knowledge is needed for an user.
The technology of 3D clothing acquisition without marker utilizes multiple synchronized cameras to construct a 3D clothing model through a series of steps as keeping space-time consistency, re-meshing and 3D deformation, etc. The latest technology of acquiring the movement of human body also utilizes several cameras in synchronization and can approximately model an human body wearing movement clothing. Both of the methods introduced above depend on a professional-level environment of multi-view modeling and so can only be used in the laboratories.
The researchers of Max Planck Institute of Germany present a method of acquiring the surface details of 3D clothing through utilizing the active lights and a photometric stereo reconstruction algorithm. However, this method is complex in modeling environment which needs setting not only multiple cameras of multi-spectrum and also setting the particular light sources after calibrated. The researchers of the University of British Columbia utilize a multi-view video of clothing movement to restore the surface details of 3D clothing through a space-time deformation method and the clothing edges in video images. This method also needs a multi-view modeling environment and depends partially some man-machine interaction during the course of designing clothing edge.
In conclusion, the existing methods of constructing 3D clothing model depend to a greater degree on setting a multi-view modeling environment and are difficult to be applied in complex 3D poses of human body and difficult to automatically acquire the geometry details of clothing surface.